Hope in the Bottom of the Box
by Boosette
Summary: Abbie and Ichabod go on a road trip, in search of a first-century manuscript copy of the Apocalypse of Saint John of Patmos, once smuggled out of the country by none other than Benedict Arnold. Unfortunately, the Hessians are after the manuscript, too. Abbie/Ichabod pre-ship casefic.


Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at /boosette/works/1092921.

For Yuletide 2013.

* * *

Three months in, and Abbie wakes to the sound of her sister's ring-tone like it was shots fired.

Takes a bleary twenty seconds before she processes that Jenny's probably stretched out on the new daybed in her ex-office, and twenty more after that before her heart-rate decreases to something resembling its resting state.

Text, not call; google voice number, not cellular. She's on the desktop, then.

It's a link to an ad for an estate sale in _Saskatchewan_, and she thumbs nearly all the way down the page before her eyes fall on an old leather steamer trunk, branded with an all-too-familiar sextant. In the photo —she adjusts her screen brightness in the dark; the inside looks like it's too small for the outside, and she tips her head back against the pillow, willing that the ceiling drop down and swallow her whole right now.

A moment passes.

She shouts into the wall, "THIS IS _YOUR_ THING."

A beat.

"THE _STATE OF NEW YORK_ WOULD PROBABLY DISAGREE."

Abbie forwards the text to Irving because she's not going go down to the cabin to wake Crane up at three in the morning over this; it's a solid half an hour before the reply turns up.

_crane stays in ND._

And a couple of minutes after that.

_I mean it, mills._

Over breakfast, Jenny is entirely too perky for not having slept more than a couple of hours, and declares that this one feels _important_.

But they can't _not_ go.

* * *

Here's what they carry with them: two banker's boxes full of Corbin's files, culled down to what she and Crane think will be useful, and a third filled with occultic bits and pieces that Jenny shoves into her arms, scowling. They haven't seen any activity from the other side or the undead since the mirror and the Moloch's promise before the holidays, and the quiet makes it worse.

"Take care of my sister," Jenny mutters to Crane when she passes him.

Abbie doesn't think she was intended to hear that. She thinks about calling after Jenny, but doesn't.

The back seat is filled with a duffel bag stuffed completely full: change of clothes, two quasi-legal rifles, ammunition, gun oil from a jar with a cracked top, spilling scent into the enclosed space. Styrofoam cooler, ice inside, with pre-made sandwiches and Dr. Pepper and Red Bull, a thermos full of coffee and a three-pound bag of green apples. Another banker's box stuffed with books. On Abbie's phone, high-resolution photos of the entire Book of Revelation and selections from the Book of Daniel, cloud-preserved facsimiles of the pages from George Washington's Bible.

Crane is responsible for the coffee, declaring the station brew scarcely better than burnt chicory.

No comments about the ice from either direction. There's a foot of snow on the ground, free for the taking, but also full of _stuff_ — exhaust and dirt and grime; Abbie had declined a receipt from the grocery store clerk and carried ten-pound bag out, balanced on one shoulder.

Abbie has spent her years since she started work at the SHPD volunteering for every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, every New Year, every Memorial Day and Fourth of July and Labor Day. She's taken her time off between holidays so people with families can celebrate with them; it means that now, in the middle of January, there's no shortage of people jumping to pick up her shifts.

There are two sleeping bags, pillows, an extravagant first aid kit they found up in the cabin. In the trunk, a spare tire, an air compressor, flares, flags, and a gallon of holy water.

"For vampires and engine fires," Abbie says.

"I seriously doubt that any soul-consuming creature would be discouraged by — " he hoists the jug demonstratively, on purpose; she can tell that now. Crane finishes, "this."

"The holy water allergy doesn't apply to these guys?"

"I've never heard of such a thing, no."

"_Wonderful_."

And they go.

* * *

Crane spends the first ten miles examining the printouts of the listing before he looks over, rolling the papers up in a tube and unrolling them a couple of times before he says that the trunk is, unfortunately, past his time.

_Welcome to Pennsylvania_ flashes past their window the next time either of them speaks. Snow's starting, pinhead-sized flakes from an ash-gray sky.

Abbie signals a right; the air's cold and what leaves are left on their branches clatter against each other. Full winter cold, missing even the smallest shimmer of spring in the air. There's no burning it off; the night's fog hangs still clinging in the ditches on the side of the road.

Crane _unfurls_ out of the car, smooths the pages out on the roof as though daylight will make them look any different than they do. It doesn't, but he's found a magnifying glass in the glove compartment, and he bends over the images, squinting, where she'd have pulled them up on her phone and zoomed in until th smooth edges turned pixellated.

"This _could _turn out to be nothing, you know," he says.

Abbie locks the car and circles over, standing on tiptoe to get a look at the printout herself. The damned sextant stares back at both of them.

"You don't actually believe that."

"I was attempting levity."

Abbie grins at that, because if only it _were _nothing. They don't get the luxury of nothings.

She says, "C'mon, there should be a coffee dispenser and a map in there."

The place is crowded inside — there's an excessively grumpy-looking guy in a backwards Atlanta Braves cap and a battered gray sweatshirt between them and the map, on the wall, so instead they keep going west and hope for the best.

* * *

The snow never does coalesce into anything more threatening than baby flakes. They talk through most of Pennsylvania: stories beyond the Cliff's Notes versions of their lives, inconsequential bits and pieces, the small trips and stumbles, leaps and victories that make them who they are. The keep it light: neither one can say what waits for them across the Canadian border, and there's enough tragedy around them already without dragging more up to the surface.

They fall into silence somewhere in Eastern Ohio; Crane stares out the window while the scenery whips past, and it occurs to her that he'd probably never have gotten this far west. Mentioning it would break the spell of wheels on road and radio static, so she doesn't give voice to the thought.

Abbie nearly swerves into oncoming traffic somewhere on the westbound I-90 in near the Ohio-Indiana border. One moment she's sure she's awake enough to keep going, and the next she has headlights in her eyes and Crane's hands over hers, pulling the car back into — and out of — their lane; it's a miracle they don't end up upside-down in by the side of the road or wrapped around a tree.

"Miss Mills," he says, "You are _unfit _to _drive _ just now, and of all the ways we might meet our respective ends, this one would be _least _productive."

Abbie can _hear _the — the first time you almost die in a car, _that _sound, that _creak _ — in Crane's voice, the effort he's putting toward keeping the it out. His knuckles are white where he grips his left knee in one hand and the Jesus Christ handle in the other.

The car coasts to a stop in the shoulder, and _now _ she's awake. She'd hoped for Chicago and would've settled for South Bend, except that when Crane looks over at her it's the same look he uses on Death itself and really, all things considered, what difference is there tonight? And yes, okay, it is time to park the car and sleep; there's truck stop motel on the next exit, which she takes.

"Okay," she replies, killing the engine. Raises her left hand, middle finger curled around her pointer. "Did people cross their fingers for luck in 1781?"

"Indeed," he says, "but they must remain crossed until such time as one sees a dog, for any accumulated bad luck to be averted. Presumably the dog carries the luck off with it."

The adrenaline has passed through and out of her system, leaving Abbie too damned tired to try and figure out whether Crane is messing with her or not. She blinks twice, grabs the sleeping bags out of the back seat, and says, shaking her hand in the air, "For an open room."

There _is _ a single available room, which they take; the woman on night-shift at the front desk gives them a thorough once-over and says, "Takes all kinds, I guess."

Crane turns right red, and in the half second between the desk's remark and his retort, Abbie's own face heats enough that she'll need to wash it cool again once they're inside.

She says, "She's going to think whatever she'll think, and we're never going to see her again."

She does not say, _no one is besmirching your honor _, but she thinks it.

* * *

It's a first-floor room: chair, table, boxy CRT television, full sized bed in the middle of the floor with its expectedly hideous motel bedspread. The whole place is brown and orange, possibly structurally unsound, and blessedly theirs until three tomorrow afternoon. Abbie drops her gear on the suitcase rack and strips the sheets and blankets, peels back the edge-seam of the mattress so she can see into its crannies.

"Might I ask ... " Crane trails off.

Abbie rises from her crouch and moves to the window-side of the bed; the heater crackles to life with a sputter. Crane sheds his coat, hanging it on the back of the one chair.

"Checking for bedbugs."

"I had dared hope two centuries of human ingenuity had done away with those."

"If you'd have woken up fifty years earlier and run into, I don't know, my grandmother, she would've told you they'd been completely wiped out."

The bed and carpet around it is free of insect life, which Abbie declares with relief. She starts unrolling her sleeping bag, catches Crane's eye, and the jumble of words that spill out of both their mouths is completely indecipherable.

"As the driver, you rate the bed."

"As the lady, you mean."

"I was not going to say that."

"You're a terrible liar, is what you are."

"I have slept on ground less comfortable than this."

"And we're both reasonable adults who's been on the road for fourteen plus hours. There's no reason for either one of us to be more uncomfortable than we have to."

But that's a standoff if ever there was one: Abbie turns the tv on for background noise; Crane goes back to the car and returns with an armful of books. The key card jangles in the lock no fewer than three times, and it takes his muffled _for the love of God _outside the door before she gets up and opens it for him.

He takes the seat by the table and Abbie flips through the handful of channels, pausing on the Christian Cable Network. Hank Susannah of _This Week in Prophesy _sits ramrod straight behind his Ikea desk, wearing a suit ten years out of style, and Abbie can't remember which foster home it was where the live-in grandmother watched him with a single-minded obsession. One of the first few; she remembers Jenny having nightmares about dragons and trumpets.

All Abbie can think is that Susannah went and got old.

_He'd _been _old twenty years ago. _

He's also picked up Sleepy Hollow's axe-wielding serial killer, holding it as an example of the encroaching end times. Along with the Healthcare Marketplace, the unrest in Syria, and something going on in Russia that she never learns because she shuts the television off in the middle of his monologue.

" _That _ is — " Crane begins, looking up from a leather-bound book. Then he stops.

Tonight they are supposed to believe that Wendy Davis is the Whore of Babylon.

"People believe it, though. You get poor enough, paranoid enough — you can spend your entire life looking forward to the end times and celebrating war and famine. It means you're getting called up into God's kingdom any second now."

"Each time I think I've finished being rudely surprised by this age ... and this one is just wrong _enough _ that it may yet prove troublesome."

They're both silent for a moment. Maybe Crane had never expected to get involved in the apocalypse before he enlisted in King George's army, but the way it's going now is like nothing Abbie was ever how told it would progress.

"We don't have any kind of a game plan, do we?" Abbie says, and then waves off the answer. "Rhetorical question. Wake me up when you finish for the night; I'll take the floor, you take second shift up here. I've slept in my share of uncomfortable places, too."

Crane never does wake her up. Instead, she blinks into consciousness with her pillow held over her head. The alarm clock blinks 9:30 AM; he's stretched out with a different book spread open across his chest, legs stretched out and feet resting on the heater.

It's gonna be a hell of a drive.

* * *

They spend six hours in dead traffic twenty miles outside of Gary, Indiana, where a UPS truck has jumped the center median.

Their late lunch in Chicago is cheese fries and the most over-dressed hot dogs Abbie has seen in her life. The diner server gives them an odd look, one they're both used to by now, but doesn't comment further; the next table over has a kid with a pink Mohawk and his girlfriend, whose furry fox-paw gloves are drying out on the sunny windowsill. Big cities have one thing going for them, at least: she and Crane are just one more piece of weird in a world that's already strange enough for anyone.

Crane expresses concern over the radioactive green pickle relish, but they're ultimately hungry enough that it passes on a "have eaten worse in worse conditions" technicality.

The fries, however, are another matter.

He makes a show of picking up a sauce-covered fry with the very tips of his fingers. A glob of cheese falls off and hits the paper lining of the red plastic basket.

"This is food?"

"Nope."

Abbie takes a fry and eats it, testament to their — if not nutritional value, then safety.

He sighs, accepting the loss, but carefully selects the least-drenched fries from the corners of the basket.

After a while, she takes out her phone and pulls up the gallery, navigates to the GW folder and reads over the Bowl judgments one more time.

"I'm concerned," Abbie says, picking the sole remaining pepper off her hot dog and setting it aside, "that we're gonna bring the box home and ... it'll be Pandora's literal box."

"With hope in the bottom," Crane murmurs, then continues, "There is one thing it might be."

"Go on," Abbie replies.

The server asks if they want anything else, and so — why not — she orders a slice of apple pie with ice cream, warm please, and squashes the twist in her gut because she had her time for mourning at Corbin's funeral and she'll have time for remembering and honoring later. When they're not holding off the end of the world.

"George Washington annotated his Bible — but he worked from multiple texts. Among them, a first century manuscript copy of _The Revelation of Saint John of Patmos _. The Continental Army held this at West Point, although it disappeared with the traitor Benedict Arnold in September of 1780. We thought it may have been smuggled north, if not shipped back to England."

"You're saying there might be a game plan in that box."

"If we are very, very lucky, the contents could provide us with an edge over our enemies."

"How's your Ancient Greek?"

Crane says something unintelligible - probably _in _Ancient Greek, and then grins. "Passable, though I prefer the Latin alphabet."

The pie arrives, and melts into a hot mess inside of five minutes.

* * *

They overnight in the Ass End of Nowhere, Wisconsin, and check out before dawn the next day.

With every mile west they cover, the other drivers come further and farther between. Abbie exits for gas and continues on to a frontage road, completely abandoned save for the fenced-in cattle and horses on the field-side. They're blanketed and winter-shaggy, and probably belong to the farmhouse-shaped dot on the horizon. The asphalt is dry despite the three feet of snow on either side, and the sky is a clear, freezing blue.

After a while she pulls off to one side, no real shoulder on this track for local traffic only, and it's Sunday — everyone is either at home curled up under a pile of blankets, or in church wishing they were home curled up under a pile of blankets. She gets out, stretches her legs, stretches her arms and back and neck until it cracks. Crane follows suit; she tosses the keys to him and he catches them one-handed.

"You wanted to learn to drive? Now's the time," she says. "There's a lever under the seat for more legroom."

"You mean to say, that we've no-one about to harm but ourselves."

Abbie smiles, climbing into the passenger seat. "Okay: two pedals, left one makes it stop, right one makes it go. This lever goes up to signal a left turn or a left hand merge, down for right. Mirror, mirror, mirror - adjust the center one so it fits your height — and you won't be able to see from the end of the front doors to about the middle of the trunk. That's your blind spot; you check that every time before you change lanes. Everybody else on the road wants to hit you about as much as you want them to hit you, so there's some built-in padding for new drivers and bad drivers. Got it?"

"It appears no more difficult than saddling a horse," Crane replies dryly, and this time she _knows _he's snarking at her.

"Foot on the break to start the car, and then you move that handle into Drive — " she points at the small white "D" on the steering column, "And that's Park, Neutral and Reverse."

The car jerks forward about five feet, and then comes to an abrupt halt. She laughs, and Crane glares.

"I was not expecting it to move so suddenly."

"Neither is every other person who's ever gotten behind the wheel for the first time."

The next acceleration is smoother, and soon they're making a solid twenty miles an hour. Crane gives it some more gas, and the car jerks ahead, going from twenty to thirty-five miles in a couple of seconds. He breaks harder than he needs to.

"Go soft on the pedals," she says. "Think ballet, not flamenco."

Crane hits the gas again, this time more smoothly. He goes to signal a lane-change, or a pass, or turn, and the windshield wipers start up at high-speed.

He slams on the breaks, which screech; a cow on the side of the road moos, and Abbie has to try very hard to not laugh. The wipers against the dry glass sound like fingernails.

"I think that I am _quite _finished," he says.

"You think wrong; I'm not leaving this seat until we hit North Dakota."

They change places again after the frontage road ends, just outside of Willmar, Minnesota. Crane doesn't get much over fifty, they need gas, and when they stop there are a couple of guys at the truckstop who keep crossing one or both of their paths.

White, mid-thirties, tattoos all up and down their arms blurred but visible beneath white, long-sleeved t-shirts.

The one with a buzz-cut head and an Atlanta Braves baseball cap follows Abbie with his eyes; she crouches down in front of the Reese's cups and still feels him watching. She misses the weight of her sidearm, currently locked safely away in the trunk of the car.

_Stop it _, she thinks, and then, _you can take either one of them _, and then, _it's probably nothing _.

"Lieutenant!" Crane calls from across the aisles, "I have located the maps!"

And compasses, it turns out; they get the with a wooden case, the image of a standing gopher and a cursive-font _Minnesota _ burned into the top.

"This is a marvel of the surveyor's craft," Crane says. He's unfolded the map of North Dakota, and attempts to view the entire state down to the most minute local road all at once. There's another folding map of Saskatchewan under his arm, along with a spiral-bound Atlas of the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

"We've covered fourteen hundred miles in under three days," Abbie says nonchalantly.

He turns his head, attempting to fold the map back up and failing, and his mouth twitches, settling somewhere between a smirk and a smile — at the scale of the trip, she'd guess.

"Have we really?"

They leave with snacks and maps and the thermos re-filled with mediocre coffee.

It takes them seventy miles before they notice a car behind them, one that's been there more or less ten or maybe twelve car-lengths away for the entire time.

* * *

The other car is a muted-brown that might've been gold back in 1995. It's looks like an old Crown Vic.

"I don't mean to cause alarm," Crane says, twisted around in his seat. "But that vehicle appears to be following us."

He's noticed that she's been watching the rear-view mirror exclusively for the last five miles, and said aloud what she did not want to.

Abbie imagines their tail hitting just _so _against the rear corner of their own car, sending them into a spin that has them upside-down on the side of the freeway.

She slows, seventy-five to sixty to fifty to twenty, where she holds. After a moment, she changes lanes, left to center to right.

The gold car follows suit, dropping back and letting an SUV pass it, changes lanes so its line of sight remains unbroken. Abbie hits the gas suddenly, swerving in and out of traffic, twenty to eighty in a minute flat. A few of their fellow motorists honk; one woman in a smart car honks _and _flips them off.

The Crown Vic is still behind them, holding at eighty in the fast lane.

"Can you get the license plate number?" Abbie asks. "God help us, let them have their front plates on — "

He replies, "I'm hardly that far-sighted, but ... perhaps — "

And a moment later Crane unbuckles and situates himself half in the back seat, leaning over the arm rest, and starts taking the sighting scope off one of the rifles. They'd packed like they might have to shoot their way out of somewhere; what kind of a scatterbrained idiot did that and forgot binoculars?

Not that they could do anything about it right now.

"If this goes on much longer I'm gonna get off the freeway at the next town and try to lose them on surface streets."

Crane curses, finds a multi-tool with its screwdriver in the pocket of the duffel, and eventually got the scope off. Abbie slows down to just under the speed limit; the gold car does, too.

A triumphant sound from the back seat, and then Crane frees the scope, pops the covers on either end, and holds the thing up to one eye like a spyglass.

She speeds up, and then hits the breaks as hard as she can safely, catching their tail off guard; for a moment they're a scant fifty feet behind, and then she accelerates again, to just under the posted limit.

"Did you get it?"

"New York," Crane says, settling back in the passenger seat with the scope in his lap. "M-K-C-9-7-7-2. They would have been us since we departed Sleepy Hollow. We should have seen them before now."

"I missed them, too," she replies. She takes her phone out, and wishes they'd thought to bring a burner along — she'd have called an anonymous tip on some terrorist activity. Spilled milk, she decides.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is at the bottom of her contact list - prefaced "work"; she calls the SHPD's contact there and reports the vehicle, asking that they be stopped at the border as a favor, instead.

"That should buy us some time," Abbie says, hanging up.

They drive on, not as crazily, and the tail stays in place behind them. Whoever's in there knows they know.

Thirty miles down the freeway Crane looks over at her, holding the leatherman up by one handle.

"I've encountered several items which claim to do sixteen things at once, and none of them well. This is not one of those things."

_Welcome to South Dakota_ flashes past, and Abbie decides that the West is too big, with too much space between too few towns and cities.

* * *

Crane does not stay in North Dakota.

That would've been easy.

The idea was: he stays with the car in Minot while Abbie takes a bus north to the Noonan Border Crossing Station, and from there calls a taxi to get to the estate sale in Estevan itself.

What happens is: They lose the tail after driving around Minot for an hour and a half, breaking every traffic law they can get away with, and are anonymous on the road again just before sunset. Abbie squints into the orange-purple sky, hoping for a parking garage where they can sleep a few hours in the car and then continue on.

They find a Tim Hortons instead, and back in between two other cars beneath a burned-out streetlight. Abbie removes the front license plate and slips inside her bag.

Tonight's dinner is coffee and a box of slightly stale Timbits. Crane orders a bacon sandwich as well.

Abbie's more than a little nauseated from the low-speed chase; her coffee is half milk by the time she's finished prepping the cup to drink. She misses whatever it was that Crane just said, and replies, "Hmm? Sorry, I missed that."

"I had thought you called them doughnut holes."

"_We_ do. Dunkin' Donuts does. Timbits are a trademarked ... Canadian ... thing."

Crane looks from her to the Timbits, and then back to her. For a minute it looks like he might bite his tongue, but no. Not gonna happen, not tonight.

"I find it utterly unbelievable that — and this is specifically not in the realm of linguistic drift, or natural evolution of a tongue — the extent to which _these_ establishments have, and continue to ... To _degrade_ the English language, dropping letters wherever they please, punctuating where none is required and — damn clarity straight to the worst of all possible hells, if an adulteration _looks_? 'good', it must _be_ 'good'! Ha!"

"I was not aware you still had such strong feelings about doughnut holes."

He makes a noise that says exactly what he doesn't: that this is about everything _except_ the doughnut holes.

"Before you say one thing more, I assure you that this was not display of 'doughnut _tax_rage'."

No, because Abbie had found an inflation calculator and given him the equation to convert 1800 dollars into 2012 dollars months ago. And after a couple of days pointing out everything that ten percent sales tax paid for, including roads and fire-fighters and free, compulsory education of children and her salary, he hadn't made a peep in that direction in a very long time.

They're both tired and irritated and worried; she lets this one go and after a couple of minutes, he takes a doughnut hole as if it hadn't just gravely insulted him.

Crane spreads the map out on the table, marking off a probable route in pencil. Then he pulls a red booklet from inside his coat, dropping it on the top of Ontario. Embossed in gold, the passport declares him a citizen of the Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. "I do not intend to remain here while you continue on."

She opens the passport — it's stamped for Canada and the US, Spain, France, and Germany, with lots of blank pages left over. The picture inside is nondescript, blurred from a flinch, eyes closed against a camera flash. White male, brown hair, might look _something_ like Crane if he shaved. 6'3", born in March of '78; Dr. James Avery last renewed in 2004. If they show up at the end of the day , when everyone's cold and tired and just wants to go home, if she can get Crane into some twenty-first century clothes — they might sneak across the border without attracting any attention. Might.

She says, "Where did you find _that_?"

Crane replies, "Inside the cabin. The good sheriff was, politely put, ready for nearly anything. Still, I would prefer to avoid the need to use forged documents."

_This is where my sister would have got her_ — . If heaven is a real thing, if Corbin is there and if she makes it, Abbie has several choice words for when she sees him again.

"If possible, we should abandon our vehicle here, or near here — " he circles a spot directly south of Estevan, and then traces a line up to the town.

"You really think you're coming with me. Do you know what happens to people caught crossing borders illegally these days? To the people helping them?"

"There are scarcely twelve miles between the United States-Canada border and our destination. That is far less than a full day's march, and will allow us to remain more easily undetected."

* * *

If she had had her choice, Abbie would have continued along with the original plan.

Instead, they stop at a sporting goods store first thing in the morning for a couple of pairs of snowshoes, and leave the car at a service station a few miles outside Noonan. They'll come back to a new timing belt and rotated tires sometime tomorrow afternoon. It's not like they specifically need the _trunk_, anyway — just what's inside of it.

"If the two of us wind up in Guantanamo Bay, I will _never_let you live it down."

"This is another idiosyncrasy of modern language which I daresay requires further explanation," he replies cheerfully, breaking a branch to mark their trail. "Tell me, Lieutenant, is navigation by map and compass still commonly taught to the constabulary?"

"It is for search and rescue, which I'm not."

Crane makes a poor step, then, sinking two feet down into the snow. He grins back over one shoulder, freeing himself, and leads them north.

He could gloat a little less, but he's in his element here, and Abbie isn't about to deny she would not do well on her own, which is why she'd intended on sticking to roads and border crossings and ... not this.

The woods smell like pine sap and snow and not much else; it's cold enough she can't feel the inside of her nose but can and _does _feel the inside of her eyeballs.

As concession to the elements, Crane has put on a hat and a a pair of mittens, which look ridiculous and anachronistic alongside the rest of him. For sound, they have a light wind and a few hardy birds, the occasional squirrel running through the branches, the crunch of their own feet in unmarked snow. Abbie has her sidearm back on her belt, carefully hidden beneath her coat, not that she could reach it in a hurry. They've decided against bringing the small armory from the car; the mechanic had remarked, _Huntin'?_, and they'd agreed that yes, they did in fact intend to go shoot a buck.

It takes all day, but they reach the highway and hitch a ride (who picks up hitch hikers anymore?) out to the house where the estate sale is being held, set to close down its first day in a little less than an hour. They'll eat when they've found the manuscript.

"Oh ... _pie_," Abbie murmurs when they get through the front door.

"How does a single person acquire so many _things_?"

"This is _not normal_."

The house looks like an episode of _Hoarders_ — most of the trash is gone, but the rest ... Every square inch, save a couple of trails through it all, are covered. Clothing, porcelain figurines, stuffed animals, a moose-head on the wall. Books and rugs and curtains and a television that was new in 1965, radiators that aren't connected to the floor, boxes full of dishes, new and old and antique. Coffee mugs and blown glass animals and a creepyass statue of an angel with her hands folded over her face. Fabric and wood and metal and ceramic and ... possibly that was a cat. Abbie can't tell from how fast it moves in and out of sight, but she hopes it's a cat.

There's a brass daybed in what has to be the living room, tarnished and heaped with handmade quilts for two dollars a piece. The woman running the sale sits in a rocking chair with no room to rock, a tiny laptop balanced on her knees and an iPhone with a card reader in the headphones port sticking out of her shirt pocket.

"Everything's for sale — take what you're interested in and we'll talk price when you get back down!" she says, sounding overwhelmed.

"I believe our best tactic would be to divide our efforts," Crane says.

"You wanna take the first floor, and I'll go upstairs?"

If anything else, the upstairs is a bigger mess than the downstairs, like it was ransacked on a weekly basis rather than lived in. She trips over an half-full paint can, the lid long-ago dried shut, and nearly topples a pile of magazines almost as tall as she is. The house creaks from her weight on the floorboards, and Abbie wonders how much longer it'll hold her, and all the stuff, before collapsing under its own weight.

She decides that is a thing she is not going to think about.

After forty-five minutes Abbie has an old leather journal with the sextant seal on the inside cover and not much else. The writing inside is cross-hatched, with lines of text running along the length of the page, and again over the width, in a tiny illegible hand. She can't tell if it'll be useful, but it's something, so she tucks it away beside their front license plate and keeps looking.

She keeps looking through the one box — a large mover that nearly disintegrates at her touch, filled with books and dust and loose-leaf notebook paper, crumpled newsprint, and dry dishrags full of holes.

The other books are all printed, leather bound and old, each one bearing a printer's mark between 1815 and 1900.

A little while later — Abbie isn't sure how long — she hears shouts from downstairs, and runs — stumbles — toward them. The shouting continues, and she follows it through the thin lines of floor available, coming to a halt behind Crane and the assholes from the truckstop back in Minnesota.

She doesn't draw, not yet, not here where she has no jurisdiction and no cause to shoot ... yet. Unless one or both of them have their guns tucked away in the waistbands of their jeans, they're unarmed. She and Crane do _not_ need an international incident right now.

"We paid for that trunk in advance!" Atlanta Braves says.

Crane replies, "That is hardly possible, under the terms of the sale's listing!"

His friend replies in rapid-fire German, and Braves rebuffs, "_Nein, und abermals nein!_ You think we've got trouble back home, just wait 'til we getta deal with Mounties and Interpol and all that shit!"

German fists both his hands, and then moves, lifting the trunk one-handed. The pile of stuff leaning against it and around it topple onto him; he shrugs all of it off. A figurine hits the floor and shatters.

Then the woman running the sale storms in on Abbie's heal, brandishing her iPhone.

She says, "If you're going to act like this, we don't want any of your business! You can act like adults or you can get out! Now pick one!"

"Ma'am," Abbie says, turning around, "That trunk has some very important ... family meaning for my cousin Steve and me. I'm sure you understand. We drove all the way from New York —"

"Coincidentally, so did we! And whatever they say they can pay, we'll double it!" says Braves.

"All right, then. You," the woman says, "Pay, now - and the rest of you - leave. _Now_."

"With all due respect, Madam," Crane says, "I saw the trunk first."

"With all due respect, Steve, you and your friend need to get out of my house. Fighting over a dead man's _antiques_, for God's sake! "

"C'mon," Abbie says. "Sometimes you have to lose gracefully."

They pick their way out around the woman and over the piles of things that have fallen into the path.

"It was a puzzle box. I had almost got it open," he says sullenly, once they're outside.

"And we can't afford antagonizing the kinds of people who would kill us as soon as look at us, right now. You know that. We both do."

They eat dinner at the first restaurant they find. She doesn't really taste the food, and Crane keeps looking over his shoulder like somebody's going to sneak out from behind a column and shoot them both.

Inside it's too warm, and outside threatens snow, with clouds hung low in the sky and a layer of fog below the clouds. The whole mess is lit dull orange from the municipal lights. This place still has a single, blinky string of Christmas lights hung in the windows, more a mockery of joyful tidings than a demonstration of actual joy.

He wants to go after them, wants to chase them down on foot, or something, anything other than sitting around waiting for the next _thing_ that's going to crawl out of the murk and into their lives. Abbie does, too, but she gets to be the one with the restraint tonight because they're in Canada illegally and the last thing she wants is to interrupt Irving's dinner with his family — he has his daughter with him this week, she remembers — to get them bailed out of jail and explain ... them. This. Everything.

When she reaches into her bag for her wallet and phone, to pay and get a cab back to the Noonan Border station, she brushes against the sextant journal and — she'd forgotten it there, in the excitement and disappointment of coming all this way to go home empty-handed.

"Any idea what this is?" Abbie says, laying the journal open on the table.

Crane examines it for a few minutes, and then his face lights up in a way she doesn't see often enough. He turns the pages carefully, touching only the very edges, and then turns the book ninety degrees and holds it to the light.

And then he laughs, full and round and, yes, joyful.

It's infectious; Abbie finds herself smiling as well.

"It's hope," he says, at last.


End file.
